The Tale by Jennifer Fox
The Tale by Jennifer Fox provides a very realistic and rightly horrifying account of sexual abuse, one which is based on the director’s real-life experience. It begins with an older Jennifer ‘Jennie’ Fox (Laura Dern) going about her life, with her fiancé, her job as a filmmaker and a professor. Her mother (Ellen Burstyn) disrupts this routine when she discovers a piece of writing by her daughter when she was 13, about a relationship with a certain Mrs.G (Elizabeth Debicki) and Coach Bill (Jason Ritter). The rest of the film follows Jennie as she flits between her fabricated memory, created by a teenage Jennie as a means to cope with the incident and the information she gains as an older Jennie.
While the narrative structure resembles that of a fictionalized feature film, the cinematography and editing reflect the director’s documentary style of filmmaking. Handheld shots introduce us to the daily life of Jennifer Fox. The constructed memory of Mrs.G and Bill that she revisits from time to time, are in perfectly framed shots. They are flatteringly framed with poise, the same poise, and elegance that her younger self associated Mrs.G with. The close-up and isolated shots of Jennifer when she is unearthing new facts, with the help of nosy but well-meaning family and friends make us aware that she wants to be left to her own devices to deal with this part of her life.
But what makes The Tale hit so close to home is the disorienting editing, moving back and forth through various memories, real and fabricated. With every figment of truth uncovered, her memory is revisited and revised, a process not too far from the process of editing documentaries itself. Perhaps it is the director’s way of confirming her stand that cinema can never really be objective. The camera might be a passive observer but certainly not an objective one. A conscious act of slicing and splicing during editing leaves no room for an ‘all objective’ look of things. Thus, the film is a physical manifestation of not just Fox’s experiences but of her filmmaking style itself. Fox mentioned in an interview that she didn’t want to make the film about sexual abuse — “I wanted to tell a story about how a 13-year-old constructed the identity of this person that I became”.
The predator doesn’t stand out in a collective; he blends in, operating on various levels of manipulation. We become highly sensitive to how we perceive Mrs.G and Bill as we have been already informed about them. They don’t look anything out of extraordinary when they help a reclusive young Jennie (Isabelle Nelisse). This makes the unfiltered sex scenes between the coach and young Jennie and Mrs.G’s deliberate silence more difficult to stomach.
Twice, we see and perhaps mirror Fox’s exasperation at how people react when they realize a person has undergone sexual abuse: first when her mother points out her ‘promiscuous’ way of life, a decidedly bad thing for her, caused by this incident. And second, when her fiancé Martin tells her that she has been a ‘victim’ in a well-meaning, ‘concerned boyfriend’ voice. Often, one has to wonder, how much a person suffers not by an incident but by the perceptions heaped up by the society. Jennifer had made peace with the conflicting emotions she felt about the incident and yet everyone around her couldn’t accept this approach of hers, looking at her as if she was damaged. The judgments of those who mean well are the ones that create the sense of pseudo freedom, the one which Jennifer tried to break out of, to gain full control of her life. A subtle hint by Fox that perhaps as a society, we need to be kinder with our words. That we need more of such storytelling that doesn’t reduce incidents of sexual abuse to a galling plot device, a common occurrence in the world of visual media representation.
Note: This was written as a part of Young Critics Lab 2019, conducted together by Film Companion and Mumbai Film Festival.
